Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

by John Hodgman

I had no idea why I was doing this. Sometimes I wondered if it was all a Yale Psychology Department experiment to see how long they could trick a student into standing by himself on a corner, counting meaningless things, and writing those numbers down on a sheet of paper that would never be read, but simply thrown into a trash can full of fire in some graduate student’s cubicle. I wondered if they were watching me from some nearby window, if they were waiting for me to figure out that the job was stupid, to give up and go back to bed, warm and refreshed and untricked, just like every other test subject had done after a single pointless morning of clicking clickers in the cold. But they didn’t know who they were dealing with. They didn’t know that when you give John Hodgman rules, he follows them all the way, day after shivering day. This is not a virtue. There is the slimmest line between doing a good job for its own sake and following orders to your own frozen death (or someone else’s).